Shoutbox

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Originally posted by John Anderton
f she makes Harry into a muggle/squib the ending would be so dodgy that I'd fly all the way till the UK just to trout slap her..

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Rofl, it's just a thought.....


Btw, an interesting thing about book's security and the way the are handled (for the american edition), comes from a mod on darkmark.com (fanta is webmaster there ):

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Originally posted by winkie

The other issue is how on earth anyone could get their hands on this and not get caught. I have worked (only telecommuting, unfortunately, and on a non-HP project) with Brad Walrod, who has done the layout for at least three of the American books.

One day I said I just had to ask him, what's it like? And he said that the text and images are given to him by security. He goes to the publisher's offices to do the layout, and every day when he leaves, he would have to prove that he had saved the work so far on an external hard disk, which was locked away, and then wipe the hard drive. Every single day. The computer that the layout is done on is certainly not connected to the internet, or the internal network of the publishers. It is stand alone. When he is done with the whole project, it is couriered to the press.

In addition, when he took the job on, he walked into a boardroom that was filled with an army of lawyers to sign huge stacks of contract. He would lose everything if he leaked, and I'm reasonably sure that this level of security was not provided only for his benefit. They keep the number of people working on this project extremely low, and take enormous legal care with it.

I work in a small publisher's studio. Here's what you need to create a Harry Potter type book in the 2nd millenium:
the writer (Jo)
an editor, possibly two
an illustrator
a layout designer/compositor
a copyeditor, possibly two
a printer (only one has to actually view the book, the press runs mechanically and electronically)

Now granted, swap Jo for a translator, and you need the same team of six to eight for each language edition. But that's extremely small.

Even when you add in security teams, this number is still extremely small. The major leak damage comes when the books go out to the bookstores and begin to tempt the people who work there. Even then, if they're caught (when they're caught, the whole point of leaks is the sharing—if you just read it and kept your mouth shut, who'd know?), the consequences will cost their jobs, and the lawsuit will cost everything else.

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